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Burnin’ the Barn. Again.

Thought it was time for Kasul to get star billing. As he and Shandra say their tearful goodbyes…. for now, folks. For now. Those two crazy kids will meet again, I promise.

But what’s happening? You thought Kasul and I were playing FFXIV? Well, *I* am, sometimes. Kasul and I decided that we needed a break from MMOs, and decided to go back in time and replay Neverwinter Nights 2. I’d played this a LITTLE bit with Team Spode years and years ago, but we didn’t play long before we decided to switch over to Dungeons & Dragons Online. The character movement was tough to deal with, everyone was splitting up and going everywhere and, personally, I had a lot of trouble keeping track of what was going on.

When Kasul and I group together, we go at a comfortable place. Kasul keeps me honest, reminding me to talk to every NPC, read every scroll, open every door… so I really, finally, know what’s going on. (And a lot of the time, it’s hey, I remember this from Neverwinter Online!).

The first chapter had us journeying from our home in the Mere of Dead Men to Neverwinter to discover the secret of a silver shard we had. The second chapter had us allying with the criminal element of Neverwinter in order to gain access to the quarantined Blacklake district (a den of the Nasher in Neverwinter Online; in the era of NWN2, Lord Nasher is still alive).

We’ve finally gained that access. We had to kill several hundred Neverwinter city guards (no hard feelings, though). We may have started a war with the corrupt city of Luskan to the north. We have completely humiliated the lesser crime lieutenants, and I’m sure that won’t come back to haunt us at any point.

And the reason for all this work, getting into the Blacklake district? So we could use the library. No, really.

The librarian immediately pegged us as non-readers, and directed us to the porn section. Tempting, but we’d been told that a document in the library’s vault would give some explanation for why the extra-planar githyanki and their bladeling servants were pursuing us across Faerun. After killing a few hundred githyanki, we managed to corner their leader in the vault. He got away, somehow. We killed everything else with a pulse in retaliation. They left behind a charred book that said that Ammon Jerro — the person we’d heard would have some sort of explanation — had left behind two living descendants. One was unknown, the name was torn from the book. But the other… the other was Shandra.

Shandra.

One of the last tasks we had to do before we could get to Neverwinter was to drive away some Sahuagin (D&D Murlocs) that were trying to drive out human colonists because the colonists were trying to take their land. Among the people at the front lines of this tug of war was Shandra the Farmer. Her neighbors had been burned out. But she was fine.

This, she explained to us, as we watched two Sahuagin run from the forest and torch her barn. Does nobody have a Wand of Halon in Faerun? She was pretty mad at us, insisting we brought the Sahuagin, and the drove us off. We eventually made peace with the Sahuagin, and they promised not to torch any more barns (or ships to Neverwinter) if the colonists would just stay to the lands they’d already settled. So that made us right with Shandra, right?

Yeah, maybe not.

She was NOT happy to see us. We arrived at her farm to find her being chased around by Githyanki. We killed them, but not before they torched her HOME. She blamed us for everything, ordered us gone, but we persisted in killing Githyanki until she finally agreed that maybe coming with us was preferable to being taken by those shriveled ex-humans.

So to our party of a dwarf fighter who wants to be a monk, tiefling thief who wants to be a bard, a gnomish bard who wants to be suffocated, a druid who REALLY loves bears, and a sorceress who is followed around by Mean Girls… to these, we add a farmer, which are, in these sorts of games, the stereotypical level 0 character, or the fabled hero that will save the world (if you’re playing Dungeon Siege, anyway).

Our road leads to her grandfather’s home, Ammon’s Haven, which sounds like a sweet, safe place. Unfortunately, we’ll have to go through Luskan to get to it….

…. next week :)

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Tipa

Web developer for a Connecticut-based insurance company that's over 200 years old! Also a bicycler, a blogger, a kayaker, and a hunter of bridges.
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